Another day by the sea. Another mocha. Man, it felt like home.

I met an old teacher of mine, from 30 years ago. I saw him and thought, dammit, I have nothing but good memories of him, I’m going to go up and tell him. So I did.

“Mr Willis?” I said.

“Hi, it’s… James isn’t it?”

From 30 years ago! I was amazed. I told him I didn’t remember much about school, but I remembered that I’d liked being in his class. He seemed pleased.

“So James… What are you doing these days?”

Tough question.

“Oh, squandering my potential, as you’d expect. Your reports were totally accurate!”

So that was nice. I wandered around, read a good book (Hiding the Elephant by Jim Steinmeyer if you’re interested), sat on the beach, pondered. Frankly, I didn’t want to leave. The sooner I get away from the orange-skied delight of Middlesbrough, the better.

OK, enough personal baloney, we want a joke: So I grew up near a town called Redcar, which was famous for an ice-cream called the lemontop – basically a tasty, tangy yellowy citrus topping to the vanilla cone confection.

Mm, we loved it. Trouble is, is taught a generation of kids to not be afraid of yellow snow. So come winter, we’d be out in the snow and:

“Ooh, look, nature’s lemontop…

…ew…

…nature’s lemontop is tangier than Redcar’s lemontop”

And nature’s 99 was revolting.

Ba-dum-tsh!